A gaze into the WMD abyss

The camera does not lie. "Never, ever" proved our Prime Minister does when he thinks he must. So do "core" and "non-core" promises. Iraq proves it, too, however shrill the protests. But the camera does not lie.

Have a look at page three of The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday. There is a photo there which shows John Howard like you've not seen him before. A little grey man burdened by, what? Responsibility? His conscience? The thought of the Mack truck bearing down? Whatever, Grandpa John, aged 64, suddenly looks every one of his years, and many more as well. An anguished, unguarded moment caught by an alert camera.

Howard is standing, in a room of people somewhere south of Perth, a cup and saucer in his hand, staring sightlessly at some bleak picture in his mind. We can only guess what it might have been. It is a riveting photo, hugely revealing of how national politics has shifted suddenly. Remember what happened on Tuesday? That was the day Howard conceded somebody - but not him - might have been wrong about Iraq's vanished "weapons of mass destruction", though that overstates the extent of his grudging admission.

The headlines next morning did not think so. "Iraq advice inaccurate: PM", shrieked The Australian's blunt front-page banner. "Howard joins wave of doubt over WMD", said the Herald's front-page more cautiously. "Howard admits WMD doubt", repeated The Age banner. He had no choice, of course. All he was doing, really, was following along, however belatedly, behind George Bush and Tony Blair, a policy of me-tooism Howard has pursued unwaveringly since September 11, 2001.

Now the chickens are coming home.

For Australians the core issue is not Iraq. It is John Howard and the truth. Two days after the murderous September 11 assaults, Howard, who was visiting the US at the time - his first meeting with Bush - symbolically invoked the ANZUS treaty. He gravely announced, in Washington: "[Australia] will provide all the support that might be requested of us by the United States in relation to any action that might be taken." What our Prime Minister was offering his friend was the blankest of blank cheques. Howard has honoured the offer ever since.

What he has not honoured is his word to the Australian people. His Government's duplicity in the invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq is unambiguous and unarguable. As Richard Woolcott, a distinguished former Australian diplomat and secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, said so forcefully in a Sydney speech last October entitled Truth and Accountability in Public Policy: "It is an aphorism that truth is the first casualty of war.

"Sadly, how true this is in this case. The fact is that the motives of the US had little to do with the removal of Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship, nor the extensive violations of human rights, nor the suffering of the people of Iraq, nor his alleged weapons of mass destruction, nor his unproven connection with al-Qaeda, especially the September 11 attack. Indeed, Iraq never threatened the US, let alone Australia. But the conservative strategists around President Bush used the emotions generated by September 11 and the threat of further terrorism as a catalyst and justification for an objective they had long held - the invasion of Iraq.

"The basic consideration was and remains the perception of America's wider strategic interest in the Middle East. What has followed has essentially been window-dressing and rationalisation to cover the strategic agenda and to make the predetermined policy to invade Iraq more acceptable to public opinion ...

"The Australian Government either accepted the Bush Administration's reasons for the war, in its determination to display itself as a totally loyal ally, or it was aware of the real agenda and persuaded itself that to join the Bush war would be in Australia's overall commercial and security interests. The reasons presented to Parliament on February 4 [last year] by the Prime Minister for joining the invasion were, in fact, a smokescreen, an attempt to justify a policy already determined for other reasons. I believe [our] Government had decided by June or July 2002, or possibly earlier, to go to war beside America if it invaded Iraq. So, in my view, we went to war on the basis of false assumptions and sustained deception ...

"It seems without doubt now that Bush, Blair and Howard exaggerated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and used intelligence selectively to support a predetermined decision to go to war ... In my experience leaders, whether elected or authoritarian, tend by nature to identify the national interest with their own personal or political party interest.

"We have also seen a carefully orchestrated campaign of military censorship and other techniques of news management, combined with the tacit acquiescence of some news organisations, aimed at ensuring that what Australians know about the war and the reasons for it was what the Government wanted them to know. In our dedicated efforts to support Washington in its Iraq adventure, the principle of truth in government was compromised and diminished ...

"To conclude, ladies and gentlemen, I believe the whole concept of truth in government - truth in Parliament - and accountability to the public has been tarnished and the credibility of our political process seriously eroded. It is a sad commentary on the integrity of our Government that the cartoonists in our major newspapers now regularly caricature the Prime Minister and several of his senior colleagues as liars ... "

Any wonder, then, that Howard was out there last week grasping at straws by insisting, after the Hutton inquiry whitewash of Britain's Blair Government, that our Government now deserved an apology from those critics who argued it had taken Australia to war "on the back of a lie". He won't get it, from anyone. The lie, as Woolcott recounted, was the Bush Administration's real motives for making war, not the expedient excuse of terrorism and Baghdad's supposed weapons of mass destruction capability. This was just a convenient blind.

Now that the Government's rationale has disintegrated, Howard was still out in radioland this week clinging to the desperate pretence of, well, "Let's wait and see." Asked baldly by Perth 6PR's Paul Murray, "Was your intelligence advice on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability right or wrong?", the following exchange ensued:

Howard: I don't think we can give the answer to that yet. If you're asking did we have intelligence supporting our decision, yes we did, as did Tony Blair and George Bush. Whether that intelligence was wrong, the jury is still out.

With respect, Blind Freddy can now see there are no weapons of mass destruction, are there? There are none. I mean, we've been looking for them for [10 months]. - Well, the work of the Iraq Survey Group is still going on.

Is there really a serious matter that you took the nation to war on the basis of bogus intelligence claims? - Well, when you say bogus, bogus implies people made it up. They didn't make it up.

They just got it wrong? - Well, history may, in the fullness of time, it might be demonstrated that the advice was inaccurate. But saying it was bogus is an unfair observation on the integrity of the intelligence agencies.

So it was just wrong? - Well, we can't be absolutely certain of that. Obviously the evidence is not pointing strongly in the other direction.

What a superbly inventive way of conceding "somebody, somewhere probably" cocked things up (or did they just lie?) - "Obviously the evidence is not pointing strongly in the other direction." Any wonder that a few hours later Howard was photographed, when he didn't know it, looking like the worst of black dogs had just engulfed him.

In Queensland today the Beattie Labor Government goes back to the polls. It has a huge majority and clearly will win comfortably, despite losing seats in the bush. You have to go back more than six years, to 1997, to find the last time the Coalition won an election (in Darwin) anywhere other than John Howard's federal success. It has been a drought as long as the real one.

The losing has been even longer in Queensland. The last time the Coalition won a general election in Brisbane was under Joh Bjelke-Petersen in 1986. Think of it. Eighteen years! Goss Labor, elected in 1989, lost government in February 1996, but only after a by-election defeat that month allowed an independent to put a minority Coalition government into power. Two years later, the next state general election returned Labor, narrowly, and made Peter Beattie premier. They've been there since.

So Federal Parliament resumes sitting on Tuesday on the back of another Coalition defeat in a year when the Howard Government, about to begin its ninth year (next month) in office, cannot avoid another election of its own. Mark Latham has re-energised Labor as much as he has revived national political interest. All in two months. What a year, whatever happens. Drink your tea, Prime Minister, and think about Labor's very own WMD coming to get you.

Another way you can block an inquiry

Eight months ago, on June 18, Labor and the minor parties and independents used their Senate majority to defeat the Government and set up an inquiry into the background to Australia's decision to join the US invasion of Iraq. The report of the inquiry, most of it held in secret, has been with the Government since before Christmas. Indeed, since before the Parliament even adjourned for the summer recess on December 4.

The Prime Minister, the Defence Minister and the Foreign Minister have all had access to copies of the report for the past two months. So have the four Australian intelligence agencies which appeared, in private, before the inquiry: ASIO, ASIS, ONA and DSD. Only a single day (August 22) of public hearings took place. Five witnesses gave evidence, all in a private capacity. The hearing lasted just four hours. All the the rest of the inquiry was conducted in camera. The five witnesses heard in public included a former head of the Defence Department, a former director of air force intelligence and the man now Governor of Tasmania, the notorious Richard Butler, a Labor favoured son of almost 30 years standing

The inquiry called no ministers and none of their staff. Why it didn't is because the parliamentary joint committee (four Coalition MPs, three Labor) on ASIO, ASIS and DSD, which carried out the inquiry, has no power to do so. Nor did any minister, including the Prime Minister, choose to give evidence. The Government opposed the inquiry and voted, unavailingly, in the Senate to try to block it. You should know all this so that you can understand what a truly useless inquiry it really was and how long its findings have been with the Government. Despite this, Parliament will not get them until March 1. The Government has decided it has more urgent business to attend to during the two weeks of sittings before then.

Something else you should know about is a story written out of Washington by Sidney Blumenthal which was published two days ago in The Guardian in London. This said, in part: "Before he departed on his quest for Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) last June, David Kay, chief of the [Americans' 1300-member] Iraq Survey Group, told friends he expected promptly to locate the cause of the pre-emptive war. On January 28, Kay appeared before the US Senate to testify there were no WMD. 'It turns out that we were all wrong,' he said. President Bush, he added helpfully, was misinformed by the whole intelligence community which, like Kay, made assumptions that turned out to be false.

"Within days, Bush declared he would, after all, appoint a commission to investigate. Significantly, it would report its findings only after the presidential election [in November].

"Kay's testimony was the catalyst for this U-turn, but only one of his claims is correct: that he was wrong. The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings that were overridden and suppressed. On virtually every single important claim made by the Bush Administration in its case for war, there was serious dissension. Discordant views - not from individual analysts but intelligence agencies as a whole - were kept from the public as momentum built for a congressional vote [a year ago] on the war resolution.

"Precisely because of the qualms the Administration encountered, it created a rogue intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans, located within the Pentagon [which] roamed outside the ordinary inter-agency process, stamping its approval on stories from Iraqi exiles that the other agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and feeding them to the President. Constant pressure was applied to the agencies to force compliance ..."

There is much more, but you get the bones. Lies and duplicity on Iraq proliferated in Washington long before they infected our Government's public behaviour.